I had a very nice time last night making a presentation to an audience of hand enthusiasts at the Windgate Center for Art and Design in Little Rock. I think there may have been as many as fifty in the audience... not bad on a Friday night when there are thousands of other things to do.
At one point, I asked the audience whether they thought that providing means of maintaining mental health should be a primary mission of American education. And of course that should be the case, and the audience agreed. We know there's a significant link between the development of hand skills, and a sense of well being. Woodworkers may call what we do, "sawdust therapy" knowing that what we do with wood make us feel better. And all other craftsmen in every other field of creative endeavor, regardless of the material involved will assert the same.
And so I ask you all a simple question. If schools have a primary purpose of providing means through which students attain and maintain better mental health, why are schools and curricula designed to alienate us from each other along a trades vs. academic divide? Why are the hands not made central to all learning? Perhaps it is easier to simply go through the motions of teaching and providing content than to become concerned about students learning and living healthy lives.
When I was in Portland we drove past a small homeless encampment and my guides mentioned the relationship between homelessness and drug use. Our first home is that which we establish in our own beings in the relationship between our heads, hands and hearts. I propose a simple idea. If we are preoccupied with discovering our own joy of creativity will we have an interest in destroying our own capacity to create? To create a proper environment for human creativity we start by empowering parents and grandparents to know this important relationship of hand/brain/heart and then we insist that education become empowered to sustain that balance.
Make, fix and create.
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